Yes I actually do like how almost every forerunner ancilla was once a living breathing person who had their essence and soul siphoned and immortalised through a digital neurophysical (neural physics!) sublimation process!
It’s genuinely brilliant and makes perfect sense, knowing what the Forerunners could do.
For those not in the know, Clarimonde or La Morte Amoureuse is a French vampire novella by Theophilé Gautier, published in 1836, and adapted for horror/softcore TV The Hunger in 1998 with Audrey Benoit in the title role. This version revises Clarimonde slightly - she's more succubus than vampire, though she still sleeps very attractively in a sarcophagus.
I have an enormous soft spot for this story: it's sumptuous, romantic, intimate, somewhat overwrought and small-cast, exactly what I want out of a vampire yarn. Clarimonde appears in the frame fiction around my indie RPG Bloodspell, and when I needed a two-hundred-year-old vampire for semi-randomised character generation that had given me a Tremere, in London but not from London, she stepped into the frame again.
The version that chargen process gave me didn't quite work out, and to be fair I didn't give her the chance she deserved - when I'm mentally unwell over RP the immediate instinct is freeze, drop, and divest, but I probably could've ridden out her rough start. As such, here we go: starting with the concept, and the sheet will come later.
The fiction-first semi-random concept process gave me this to work with:
Tremere (House Carna) with a position of authority/accomplishment within the clan
Predator Type must use a Mental Attribute
Mortal concept: an investigator who touched the darkness and found it never let her go (Investigation, Insight, something else I don't remember: Obvious Predator flaw, which I think is where the idea of using Clarimonde came in, via Benoit's slightly... distant performance)
Prelude and aftermath: sire was executed for a breach of the Masquerade, and childe learned the real First Tradition is "don't get caught" (Conviction: never take the blame)
Eras of her existence, as an ancilla, were Intrigue, Violence, and Torpor
I went off and looked at teh loar for once, needing help gelling this character, and discovered Carna had been prince of Marseilles once upon a time. Wiki-diving the history of Marseilles gave me a Commune in 1871 and a subsequent period in which organised crime was the name of the game, only petering out with a well timed assassination in 1943. That locked in either end of the Era of Violence.
I already had 1836, the publication of the novella La Morte Amoureuse, locked in as another significant date. When I cracked In Memoriam, that gave me the Montmartre Massacre: an event in Paris during the 1830s in which Prince Francois Villion had enough of these motherfucking neonates in his motherfucking city and had a bunch of them put to death.
Hooking that into the Masquerade breach plot point makes my girl here part of the Massacre, and perhaps makes the publication of the novella an element in that. I decided Romauld from the novella had been a disgruntled ghoul, passed over for Embrace after Clarimonde jumped the gun, got drunk with a poet and confessed his story, vilifying "that vampire whore" and getting his distorted version of events written up and published.
That was another break point. My gal survived that, and became an early pupil of Carna's, learning her trade at the feet of the mistress before Carna was sent to the United States and her ward forced to undergo Tremere Separation Anxiety.
The last key date, also derived from teh loar, was 2008. Marseilles was cleared of vampires by the nascent "Second Inquisition," a kind of dry run for what would happen in London a few years later. How did my girl survive that? Torpor. She literally wasn't there at the time. She'd been underground, or underwater - clipped by a bomb during the liberation, maybe? - for seventy years, woken up later, and found herself de facto Regent by virtue of her chantry being gone.
Adopting the name Amerie Claremont, she travelled - wanting beyond anything to reconnect with her saviour, teacher, guardian, mentor and Prince. She would love to be one of those wide-eyed mystics who explore the limits of sex and sorcery, but history has made her something else: something practical, dead-eyed and dead inside.
I'm still happy with that backstory, and with the basic setup.
I might also quite like some more Eras - she ended up with three by a quirk of the RNG system being used, and they are running a little long. She's over 150 years old so by the book she'd have five Eras under her belt, although I don't really have beats for all of them and forcing Sorcery in there just for the extra Rituals seems cheap.
I think I could fit Excess in there at the very least, representing her time in Paris before the Massacre, and maybe flip the Masquerade breach on its head - maybe a spurned blood doll was responsible for the confessional, maybe there was some tension between her lovers that made her stop doing the "pretend you're human and have sex with hot young priests" act and flee Paris as a neonate rather than a fledgling.
I do want to keep the Investigator type backstory for her, as I think that makes more sense for a Tremere than her having been a courtesan to start with - and the courtesan beat probably comes from being mixed up in a blood cult, or in the general vibe of Villon's court. I would change the Flaw, though: Obvious Predator was too much and off message, whereas something like Unblinking Visage works better for the weird affect I see her showing.
dividers by @diableriexdoll, photos of Audrey Benoit via IMDB or stills from The Hunger, illustrations by Decisy and Laurens from the 1904 publication of La Morte Amoureuse, moodboard by me.
